Day in town for museum, Mawson’s hut and shopping.

What a difference a day … an hour … makes. Sunrise is like the inside of a conch shell, the white center giving way to soft and gradually darker pinks with crimson streaks and ethereal violet at the edges. Cars race pell mell down roads that were empty at the same time yesterday. Neither of US has to work today.

As the four of us prepare sandwiches to take on the day trip to Port Arthur, the sky opens up and pelts Hobart with rain. That ethereal violet is now abysmal gray. OK. We’ll stay in Hobart for the day and go to the Cascades, a women’s prison originally built as a distillery in 1829 but repurposed when a brewery next door put it out of business. A lovely place. You were stripped and your head was shaved the minute you arrived to shame you (the hair was sold or used to make bricks for local construction). Cholera and typhoid ran rampant. If you had a child age three or younger, you kept it but keeping it was almost a death sentence for the child, given the mid-nineteenth century’s lack of knowledge about nutrition and disease or medicine to treat infections. If your child was older or reached three, it immediately was removed to an orphanage.

The stream nearby, often full of sewage and effluents from the brewery next door and the homes up a hill behind it, flooded regularly when it rained and filled the cells with … let’s not go there. The prison had five “yards” — rather large sections within stone walls, each section with its own cells, work areas, etc. — and the only reason why many of the women in Yard 3 survived better than other women in the prison or male convicts on the prison ship Anson in the harbor was because the women were packed three to a cell. The men were in solitary. So the women had each other for conversation and, more importantly, warmth. The men and other women died from the mental pressures of isolation and physical deprivations.

It rains again.

The women put in solitary cells, usually for six-month terms, had to pick oakum from ships in the harbor in cells so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Oakum ropes, used to caulk the spaces between planks, are covered in tar and barnacles and the women would have to pick it clean with their fingernails. Cuts could be deadly in a time without antibiotics.

Yard 4 was built in the 1850s and included a separate nursery, a yard open enough for sunlight to warm occupants, and rooms on a second floor with windows that could be opened. But it was a death sentence for babies because the women were not allowed to talk to them. Babies, we are told by our guide, would stop eating due to the silence … and die.

“Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

We drive from the Cascades into town where we park in a lot that’s free for the first 90 minutes but you have to drive for 20 to find a space. We walk to exact replicas of Mawson’s huts, whose originals are at Cape Dennison at Commonwealth Bay in Antarctica. Douglas Mawson on January 16, 1909, was the first person to stand directly above the south magnetic pole: the place where the earth’s magnetic field is exactly at a right angle to its surface so your compass needle spins wildly and then stands straight vertical.

Eighteen men packed into a tiny hut, their sleeping bunks lining the walls. The acetylene heater near the roof kept the interior temperature a cozy four degrees centigrade. The windiest place on earth we’re told. Videos of explorers putting up a tent near the hut back in the day seem to confirm this.

There’s an account of how Mawson went on an expedition in 1912 with two other men — Belgrade Ninnis and Xavier Mertz … there’s some names you don’t hear every day — plus a dozen huskies and beaucoup supplies. Ninnis and six dogs and most of the supplies disappear in a crevasse. Mertz dies later, probably from an excess of vitamin A from eating the remaining dogs’ livers. After harrowing further adventures and narrow escapes, Mawson is rescued (a six graph story on its own but Cynthia won’t permit David to waste your time or hers writing it).

We’re leaving out the part where Mawson began Antarctica’s first newspaper called the Adelie Blizzard. Peter Ginna and his father, David’s uncle Bob, would be fascinated by how that came about and what its content became. Cynthia won’t (it’s always the mother’s fault…).

It rains again.

We go to the Hobart Art and Cultural Museum, where we learn about the systematic eradication of the aboriginal people, the systematic eradication of the Tasmanian tiger (the Willem Defoe movie The Hunter notwithstanding), the systematic eradication of flora and fauna. We only have an hour. We are breathless and, again, overloaded with information and sensory stimuli.

We learn that the Antarctic ice sheet is 12.3 million square kilometers big and contains 25.7 million cubic kilometers of ice. It’s big. It affects EVERYBODY’S weather. Well, maybe not Trump’s.

It rains again as we return to our car and go to the end of the harbor to see a research vessel that looks like something out of Star Trek. Cynthia spots a row of shops where she might get a card and maybe something very designer-esque to leave for the people in whose apartment we’re staying, and we almost buy a $3,000 (Aus) painting (really a collage of a couple hundred photographs turned into a limited edition print called “Spilt Milk” by an artist named Suellen Cook, but, ahem, “we” do not).

It stops raining.

We return to our apartment for gin, after which we walk to a Nepalese restaurant surprisingly named Kathmandu, which has a negligible cork fee for our Grant Burge Barossa Valley Filsell Old Vine Shiraz (2015) — we’ll get to updating our wine pages when we get sober — and really lovely waitresses and food.

Uber home but without Nick.

Another rainy, stimulating, fascinating day in Tasmania.